Amazon Web Services has just named the seven finalists for this year’s $100,000 Startup Challenge. The prize will go to the most innovative startup built on Amazon’s cloud-computing infrastructure. The winner will get $50,000 in cash, $50,000 in AWS credits, and maybe even an investment from Amazon. The finalists are:
Encoding.com—Video encoding over the cloud.
Knewton—Online test prep service for standardized tests like the GMAT. Its adaptive testing/adaptive learning engine can be applied to any educational publisher’s content.
MedCommons—”cloud-based Health 2.0 application services for patients and doctors.”
Sonian—Archives and indexes emails that companies need to keep for compliance reasons, making them easy to search later.
Pixily—Document management for both scanned and electronic docuiments.
Yieldex—Online ad optimization engine for Web publishers.
Zephyr —online tool for managing software quality testing
Which one do you think should win? Just based on traffic, it looks like Encoding, Knewton, and Pixily are the strongest contenders. (Last year’s winner was Ooyala, which edged out Justin.TV).
Pixily—Document management for both scanned and electronic docuiments.
Hopefully Pixily will have a spell-checker.
Vencorps is more interesting than this.
These are some great finalists. I would especially like to see pixily.com get this one.
pixily.com is impressive.
http://vidsonly.blogspot.com
yeah i agree with you on that!
ummm, these are not all consumer facing companies. using traffic to pick a winner amongst them makes no sense…
I liked the yieldex.com and pixily.com
Congrats to Prasad, Vik and Anand at Pixily.
pixily.com pricing is steep. $60 for scanning 200 pages. And total of 12000 pages of storage is not that much. In couple of years you can easily store that much. Now that most of the places provide you downloadble files (brokerages, phone companies, credit card companies, turbo tax and many more) I can easily store it myself. Searching/sorting and text recognization are pluses, but price is still high for that.
Dear @dks123,
We understand your concerns about Pixily pricing. The $60 you mentioned here is for a 4-envelope pricing per month. That is, you can mail documents in four first-class prepaid scanvelopes. These documents are scanned into your account and are made searchable. The documents are then mailed back to you in pre-paid envelopes. From our research, we found that an average household tends to collect about 50 sheets of paper per month and a small business accumulates about 200 sheets.
For people who would like to scan their own documents or have gone paperless, they can subscribe to the digital plan for $4.95 a month. You just have to upload them into your account and take advantage of the visual search, share and labeling features. More importantly, you now have anywhere, anytime access to your documents.
If you do exceed your monthly storage limit, you can purchase additional storage at 15 cents for every 100 pages.
If you do have further questions, please do not hesitate to either call us or email us.
Sincerely,
Prasad Thammineni
Pixily Customer Care
888-ORG-NIZE
contactus@pixily.com
“The prize will go to the most innovative startup built on Amazon’s cloud-computing infrastructure.”
Incorrect. The prize will go to the most innovative *US based* startup built on AWS.
That’s probably only about half the pool, if that.
It’s kind of like the so called “World Series”, that features only American teams. Nevertheless, there are some interesting startups here, I look forward to checking them out.
great incentive to develop on amazon cloud platform
i think knewton should take it. really impressive idea, hot space, and great use of the cloud.
WOW, looking at Zephyr, seems like Enterprises are now finally moving to the cloud computing.
Anybody sick of the word ‘could’ yet?
or ‘cloud’
I could never get tired of the word ‘cloud’.
Although they are not directly related, both Microsoft and Amazon are making some very positive strides with startups, I certainly think that Amazon is THE startup platform, but Microsoft could prove me wrong.
The issue that I saw with them, is many of them already have VC or Angel funding… Some of them quite large amounts, Encoding and Knewton, for example, have already received $10 million and $2.5 million, respectively. In fact, for most of the finalists I was able to find their funding sources and saw that a lot of them were already well on their way financially, even without this contest.
I vote for encoding.com !!
Congrats to the selectees! I’m disappointed we didn’t make the cut, but I can see these start-ups are much farther along than we are. We’ll watch their progress, and maybe we’ll learn enough to be ready for the next AWS challenge.
Michael Bragg
michael.bragg@fuelclinic.com
http://www.fuelclinic.com
Zephyr is a great looking app and I am glad enterprise 2.0 is still kicking,
Go Zephyr Go!
And the winner of the 2008 AWS Challenge is…
YIELDEX!
Way to go!
great competitors. would be great to have a review of how they are doing a year after the competition.
will there be a 2009 competition?